Yip Wai Yee reports for the Straits Times about the Taiwan Centres For Mandarin Learning:
How do you say “MRT” in Mandarin?
In this particular Chinese language class, the correct answer is “jieyun” – a Taiwan-specific term – and not “ditie”, which is used in mainland China.
Reading comprehension exercises here can be about Taiwan’s night markets, with references to stinky tofu and bubble tea; and writing is done in traditional Chinese characters instead of the simplified characters preferred across the Taiwan Strait. […]
The scenes described above provide a snapshot of what lessons are like at a Taiwan Centre For Mandarin Learning (TCML) – the Taiwan government-funded overseas learning centres which, as they admit, offer Mandarin education with “Taiwanese characteristics”.
Since their introduction in 2021, Taiwan’s Overseas Community Affairs Council has set up 88 centres across Europe and the US, in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Paris, as part of Taiwan’s efforts to use Mandarin to promote cultural diplomacy. […]
Besides the programme, Taiwan also runs a long-running scholarship programme offered to international students, including from Singapore, to travel to Taiwan to study Mandarin.
A long-ago girlfriend of mine studied at the Stanford Center, and they seemed to do a good job (I joined her and taught English and linguistics at Tamkang University, an experience that convinced me I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, although I remember my students there with great fondness). The link was sent me by Bathrobe, who adds “I didn’t know how jiéyùn was written so I looked it up. 捷運”; that, put into Wiktionary, enabled me to find out what “MRT” meant: Mass Rapid Transit. Thanks, Bathrobe!
“MRT” meant: Mass Rapid Transit.
English with Singaporean characteristics
I assumed “magnet resonance tomography”…
(Known to chemists as NMR, “nuclear magnetic resonance”.)
Also my first idea, but then I found out (WP told me) in English that’s MRI.
Oh, yes… “imaging”.
I wonder if people who use babl-chay rather than babl-ti in Russian (e.g. ru.WP) understand that they borrow more from English (namely, a word bubble and a construction).
I assume “MRT” wasn’t really a thing yet in China in 1949* so it’s not like the KMT brought 捷運** with them into exile, but rather that the competing Mandarin-speaking regimes came up with different coinages when they finally had the need post-1949 to talk about it.
*Timeline of the referent’s planning and construction in Taipei can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_Metro
**reportedly pronounced chia̍t-ūn (in Presbyterian orthography) in the actual Taiwanese language.
Well, Mainland dìtiě 地铁 (地鐵 if you’re from Taiwan), conventionally known in English as a Subway (New York usage) or Metro (from French Métropolitain), is short for 地下铁道 (地下鐵道) dìxià tiědào or underground railway (cf the Underground). I always thought of transit (mass transit or rapid transit) as American, but I could very well be wrong.
The Communist usage is much closer to Japanese 地下鉄, and Tokyo’s subway dates back to the 1920’s. First subway in mainland China opened (in Peking) in 1969, which again is consistent with lack of any estabished Mandarin lexeme at the time KMT-style Mandarin moved offshore in 1949, but it’s not immediately clear to me why the Taipei subway wouldn’t have likewise calqued the Japanese word.
Singapore’s MRT and Taipei’s MRT opened within a year of each other in 1986-87. Must have been the trendy term back then. The Beijing subway opened in 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, and 地下铁道 (underground railway — note the word 铁道 tiědào, Japanese for “railway”, not the Chinese term 铁路 tiělù) was probably the neutral term. Had they opened it a few years later they might have chosen a sexier name, but I assume the glitz of the West didn’t yet have its current allure in those days.
(I see from Wikipedia that the “Taipei Metro” is also known as Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) and is branded as Metro Taipei. What a tangled web they have woven.)
(Note: Even Tokyo seems to have rechristened part of its network the “Metro” in English. I have no idea how current this word is in Tokyo now.)
And in Hong Kong it’s the MTR. I’m pretty sure they use dei6tit3 地鐵 like the mainland, but I have no idea why. Apparently, it dates to 1910, but I also have no idea what it was called in Cantonese then.
The MRT in Hong Kong is initialed MTR, from which it’s easier to get to Metro, to my ear.
Taiwan already has a vast rail network, so the MRT is chiefly to serve expanding Taipei suburbs. Never the less, building it is taking ages. It’s only a few years ago it reached Taoyuan the international Airport. And this line has been under construction at least 8 years https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/6182473
And this line has been under construction at least 8 years
That’s nothing.
Er, the Taipei MRT did not “open” in 1986-87. Construction didn’t begin until 1988. As you can see in Wikipedia, the first line began running in 1996. Initial construction took a long time, as does continuing construction. I’m not going to complain (anymore), though, because when lines are completed they make a huge positive impact on the convenience of getting around. I still hate city buses because of my horrible experiences with them 1975-1996. Note that in addition to the Taipei-New Taipei-Taoyuan system there are similar systems in Taichung and Kaohsiung.
When I was a student here in Taipei 1975-77, people told me a subway could not be built because Taipei is a basin with a lot of groundwater, and the engineering couldn’t be done. Outside of Taiwan 1978-1981, people told me a subway wouldn’t be built because the government wanted to save money for retaking China. But some change of govt. attitude was already apparent with the completion of the north-south National Highway 1 (freeway) in 1978. I visited some sections under construction in 1977 with an engineer I knew then.
I might also add that the Taipei system is, in my somewhat limited experience of subway-metro systems (BART in the Bay Area, Madrid, London, Bucharest, Vienna, Prague), one of the cleanest and most convenient and orderly. Vienna was pretty good, actually, but I only took the subway a few times, so it’s harder to compare. I always have trouble figuring out BART.
one of the cleanest and most convenient and orderly.
I wouldn’t disagree, but no more orderly etc than Singapore or HK. (I’ve not experienced Tokyo.)
Neither have I experienced Taichung’s: it so far covers only the swanky Central/Northern parts of the city, whereas I stay in the hugger-mugger southern suburbs. (Which I guess present more serious engineering challenges: there’s groundwater everywhere; no wide boulevards to put the tracks above.)
Kaohsiung, as well as its MRT, has a cute battery powered tramway running on disused rail tracks around the port/gentrified warehouses and former rail marshaling yards. Rather than overhead power cables, there’s an overhead charge point at each stop.
I’d give the buses a second chance: I’ve had mostly positive experiences. Of course they’re slow; generally few bus lanes.
Hong Kong’s MTR operates a number of lines in the Mainland Chinese cities of Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. During a recent visit to Shenzhen, I was startled to hear the announcement “Thank you for using the MTR”. I didn’t catch the Mandarin and Cantonese versions of the announcement which preceded it.
The MTR is called 港鐵 in Traditional Chinese and 港铁 in Simplified Chinese, pronounced Gǎngtiě in Mandarin and Gong2tit3 in Cantonese, where the first character is the short form of the name Hong Kong used in compounds. So it would have been interesting to see if they said what amounted to “Thank you for using the (Hong) Kong Railway” in the Chinese announcements as well, or if they used 地铁 dìtiě and 地鐵 dei6tit3 respectively and were only using MTR in the English version.
The MTR Corporation is also active in Sweden and Australia among other places, apparently.
i wonder if there’s a pattern to whether public transit systems generally (as opposed to officially) get called by a generic (“the subway” in nyc; “the metro” in dc and paris; “the underground” in london; “the el” in chicago; etc) or an acronym (“the [MB]T[A]” in boston; “the BART” in sf/oakland/etc; these various MRTs and MTRs; etc). i can’t readily see one, myself…
it’s not immediately clear to me why the Taipei subway wouldn’t have likewise calqued the Japanese word
No idea if that’s true or some random editor’s personal theory; the linked 地下鐵路 does not include that meaning.
Wikipedia covers a wide range of mostly Western names at Passenger rail terminology and linked articles.
BART, never “the BART”. Also, it’s not exactly comparable, being more of an inter-town commuter train, like the LIRR.
…or maybe yes I’ve heard “the BART” in connected speech? Hm. It sure looks weird.
Er, the Taipei MRT did not “open”
Sorry Crawdad Tom. I think my eyes just glazed over. Time to see an optometrist.
Per wikipedia it looks like “Tokyo Met[o]ro” as a brand identity for the largest subpart (currently 9 lines out of 13 total) of Tokyo’s subway system may only be about 20 years old. When I was a gaijin kid living in Tokyo 50 years ago I think “subway” was the only English word I recall using generically (as contrasted with something more specific like “the Chiyoda Line”), but I obviously can’t swear that there weren’t other Anglophone gaijins and/or ESL-speaking locals who used a different English word for the same referent.
I still hate city buses because of my horrible experiences with them 1975-1996.
What, you didn’t enjoy being packed in like a sardine and having to fight your way to the exit?
We were apparently in Taipei at the same time (for me, 1977-78), so maybe we unknowingly sat next to each other at the Dong Men Jiao Tzu Wang (or however they spelled it) or the one place in town that served decent burgers.
“the metro” in dc and paris
I would like to say that the DC metro is so named in honor of the city’s Parisian (via Lafayette) roots, but sadly the name comes from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs the system (buses too).
I wouldn’t focus so much on Lafayette but on his erstwhile sidekick the Paris-born Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who was the prime mover in the original design and street layout etc. for WDC back in the 1790’s. Although his plan did not contemplate a Metro, which the Paris of his time lacked.
He could, on the other hand, have contemplated a hot-air balloon transport system.
Well, the whole system, or just the subway? Le métro in Paris is just the subway; likewise die U-Bahn in German-speaking places and metro (fully declinable) in Prague.
@DM: You mean the Uuuuuu-Bahn!
BART, never “the BART”
OTOH Dublin has “the DART”, maybe because its backronym is a common noun, not a proper noun.
No problem, Bathrobe.
Maybe we did, languagehat. Or perhaps the Italian restaurant in the basement of the Hilton Hotel?
I checked the Google, and some people do say “take the BART”, and some of them are locals. It still seems a lot less common than “take BART” (and I say “the” before freeway numbers, which I picked up in SoCal.)
Or perhaps the Italian restaurant in the basement of the Hilton Hotel?
Never went there — the Hilton was alien territory to me.
Time to see an optometrist
Unless the problem is brain fuzz, which is somewhat more alarming….
apologies to all the bay area people who resist the article! i meant no disrespect (and i share the urge to side-eye the southern california way of talking about highways).
@David L:
Washington MATA! (as millions throughout the hemisphere can attest)
@DM:
even here in nyc, the subway is only part of the larger MTA system; but the acronym is generally only used to refer to the system administration*, not to its elements (as opposed to, historically, the IRT, BMT, or IND, which can refer to the lines themselves as well as the companies that ran them, or to them as subsets of the subway system).
.
* i often tell friends “i’ll be there by 2pm [or whenever], MTA willing”, but i’d never say “i’m taking the MTA uptown”. being the person i am, i might say “i’ll take the west side IRT there”, but i don’t really expect anyone under 60 to have any idea what i’m talking about.
In the NYC area we are ubiquitously arthrous when talking about highways, unless (this is the distinction from SoCal) they are known by a numeral. But otherwise it’s the Deegan, the Hutch, the LIE, the BQE, the Garden State, etc. etc.
“MTA” was arthrous in Boston.
Eh, rozele, I surely commit local faux pas that I don’t even know about. All language is beautiful (except when people think it’s cool to try to talk like yuppies).
Because I lived in LA, non-arthrous freeway numbers sound to me like Tarzan English, but one man’s catsup is another’s ketchup, reputedly.
That said, even I can tell that “the MTA” is plain weird.
By the time I lived in Boston, nobody seemed to use “MTA” for the Subway, for at least two separate reasons. First, some time after Walter A. O’Brien, Jr. had run for mayor of Boston in 1949, the agency rebranded itself as the “MBTA.” This was probably done both to distinguish it from the New York MTA and to get rid of the name used in the song. Secondly, when people subsequently spoke of the “MBTA,” they only used it to refer to the actual agency, just like the situation rozele describes in New York. Also analogously, the MBTA also manages other forms of public transit than just the subway (including busses, water taxis, and some aspects of the commuter rail system). People normally just called the subway “the subway,” or referred to the specific line involved by its color: Red Line, Green, Orange, or Blue.
I think “take the T” has some currency at present in the Boston area as an alternative to “take the subway,”* but the T is unaccompanied by any other capital letters in that phrase.
*Or whatever. You can fuss over whether the Green Line is a subway in the strict sense …
Yes, sorry, there is also “the T.” I can’t believe I forgot that. However, there was always a bit of ambiguity about what exactly that term covered: just the Red Line (uncommon at the time, but definitely heard), Red Line and Green Line (more common, perhaps because those lines were much older than the others), or any subway line (the most common meaning, and the one I would assume given no further information).
A related Massachusetts shibboleth arose in connection with transcriptions of the lyrics of “MTA.” What was* the name of the station where Charlie’s wife handed him a sandwich?
* The song was sufficiently popular that somebody once created a Web site to document all the reasons Charlie would have eventually been let off without paying an exit fare.
Isn’t it the Scollay Square station? That’s what I find online, and it jibes with my memory of the song.
For whatever reason, most Web sites have that line correct now. However, there are still lots and lots that do not. For decades, it was easy to find printed and later digital transcriptions that did not spell “Scollay” correctly. It’s like in this story; to someone who does know the T, it makes no difference, but folk from the Boston area will be laughing behind their hands.